David Lodge

(b. January 28, 1935)

in 1971 David Lodge invented the now famous image of the novelist at the crossroads.
In 1971, at least in Lodges view, realism was still the principal route chosen by the
majority of novelists. There had been exceptions writers who, after Joyce et al., had
kept the torch of modernist experiment alight but more frequently contemporary
novelists would simply hesitate at the crossroads and then build their hesitation into
the novel itself
To decode Lodges metaphor: the radicalism of modernism had by 1971 become an
accoutrement, a decorative feature of the mainstream, realist novel.
American fiction and criticism: a willed ignorance of the fact that it is both novelist
and critic who are at the crossroads.
The British Museum is Falling Down

Short Summary: The novel describes a day of Adam Appleby, a Catholic research
student, married with Barbara and father of three children (and supposed to expect another):
the first chapter starts at Appleby's home, where we understand that probably Barbara is
pregnant again. Most part of the following chapters is set in the Reading Room of the British
Museum, where Adam works at his thesis, whose subject is not yet defined. The reader
follows Adam vicissitudes, the meeting with his friend Camel, the false fire-alarm in the
British Library (which is one of the funniest events of all the novel), lots of encounters with a
fat American man, the Dollinger meeting, the visit at Mrs Rottingdean's house where he's
tempted by the sensual teenager Virginia and so on, until his going back home when, during
the epilogue, thanks to Barbara's interior monologue, we understand that she's not pregnant.

written by David Lodge in 1965

it's considered by the author himself the first novel whose aim was to treat some of
the most important subjects for Roman Catholic married people about the birth
control in a sort of comic way
The novel underlines the moral and ethical questions most Catholic married people
had in mind in the early 1960's
it is considered the first experimental novel of Lodge, above all for its narrative
form: it's a mixture of literary genres and styles which becomes the most salient
feature of Lodge's creative writing
This experimental novel combines realism, fabulation and non-fiction narratives:
Lodge uses parody, poliphony, comic interludes, allusions, interior monologues, free
indirect speech, stream of consciousness and so on, connecting his critical and
academic role to his creative one. Particularly his double role allows him to enter on
metafictional novels' way of writing, according to Lodge's own words, which makes
the problem of writing a novel the subject of the novel"
At the beginning of the novel there are two important quotations; the one from Oscar
Wilde says Life imitates art.: it's a clear reference to Adam's behaviour towards his
life because he often confounds real life with literary works, but it also seems to
anticipate Lodge's parodic style, which will be a leading element all along the novel,
because it focuses on the relationship between fiction and reality and between fiction
and fiction15.
 The novel is divided into ten chapters with the addition of the Epilogue; every chapter
tells an episode and starts with a quotation which gives us some information about
what we're going to read.
The narrator is omniscient and the narration is in the third person singular but it's
also characterized by a great poliphony, in fact, not only, does Lodge frequently make
characters talk to themselves thanks to free direct speech, but we also know the
character in his interior mind and feelings thanks to free indirect speech, which makes
us very much closer to the character's thoughts. Moreover the author doesn't make a
description of his protagonists, he lets us know their attitudes or behaviours just
describing their actions

Main Themes

1. the first is a religious question, which is about birth control according to the
Roman Catholic Church: married people had to control their sexual life using
the Safe Method (complete abstinence from sexual relationships for a certain
period established by "yes" corresponds here to Barbara's perhaps: this probably
underlines the differences between the certainties of Joyce's measuring woman's
body temperature every day to be sure that the following period is safe), which
was the only contraceptive method allowed by the Church.
The day described by the novel is characterized by Adam's changes of
thoughts and feelings about this possible new birth (when he has almost found a
job he's very happy of Barbara's pregnancy, but when he phones her she
announces to him she was wrong. But when he "loses" the job possibility he
receives a phone call announcing she's sure she's pregnant). During the day Adam
frequently speaks about the possibilities of contraception Catholic couples don't
have, above all with Father Finbar and with the Dollinger Society members,
showing his moral indecision between being a perfect Catholic who respects the
Church's precepts or being an innovator but a misbeliever by using the
contraceptive pill.
2. The second theme is Modern Literature; Adam Appleby is a research student
and he often confounds real life with his study subject. Adam, who is constantly
day-dreaming or having a sort of hallucinations, allows the author to mix, all
along the text, the facts of the novel with literary elements, which can remain
 hidden, or just mentioned, or clearly quoted, giving to the novel a great
component of innovation.
The most important allusion to a literary work is undoubtfully the epilogue
of the novel: it's an interior monologue with a lot of components of Joyce's typical
stream of consciousness, especially for what concerns the last part of it. The
fundamental features of this monologue are the complete absence of punctuation-
marks and the presence of a lot of sentences which describe thoughts as they come
into one's mind without any connection; but the most important fact is that the
narrator has now moved into the character's mind which is talking with
himself.
3. Another important theme of the novel, which can be linked to the religious one, is
woman's body and how it is perceived by men: all along the novel there's a kind
of hidden journey which leads the reader into the human body (especially the
feminine one). The Reading Room of the British Museum is described as a huge
womb protecting its foetus-like scholars:
He passed through the narrow vaginal passage, and entered the huge womb
of the Reading Room. Across the floor, dispersed along the radiating desks,
scholars curled, foetus-like, over their books, little buds of intelectual life thrown
off by some gigantic act of generation performed upon that nest of knowledge,
those inexhaustible ovaries of learning, the concentric inner rings of the catalogue
shelves.
At the beginning of the fifth chapter the Museum's entrance is described as a
big maw swallowing visitors and readers like food (so in this case the Reading
Room is probably identified with a human stomach); later Adam escaping and
hiding himself on the uppermost of the book-lined galleries beneath the Dome
looks down at the Reading Room thinking at the precise simmetry of its design
and he compares it to a human brain.
Changing places

Short summary: Changing Places is David Lodges hilarious account of an academic

exchange program which takes Philip Swallow, an obscure professor of English literature at
an obscure red-brick university in England, to Lodges comic version of the Berkeley
campus, which he renames Euphoric State. It also takes Morris Zapp, his American
counterpart, from Berkeley to Swallows campus of Rummidge (read Birmingham)
University in the dreary industrial midlands of England. Along the way we are treated to
Lodges wild send-up of academia, sex and marriage, the literary scene and the differences
between American and English attitudes and lifestyles. Hardly a single inanity of campus
life in the late 1960s escapes Lodges deftly-wielded scalpel. Yet he handles all of this with
an affectionate and indulgent tone: although he may find his characters foolish and
misguided, he nevertheless leaves us with the impression that he genuinely likes them,
despite their faults and all-too-human foibles.

Lodges two protagonists are cleverly drawn to personify what we have come to
assume, rightly or wrongly, are national characteristics of the stereotypical
Englishman and American.
Philip Swallow is a polite, mild-mannered, diffident fellow, who is introduced
to us as a paradigm of the solid family man, devoted to his wife Hilary and their
two young children. Morris Zapp, by contrast, is a brash, swaggering, funny,
lecherous academic, who has gained a world-wide reputation for being the
premier expert on, of all things, the genteel writings of Jane Austen.
Lodge takes great fun in contrasting the direct, in-your-face American style of
the brilliant and abrasive Zapp with the polite, rather oblique English style of
the timid and self-effacing Swallow.
Lodge also draws amusing parallels between his two faculty wives: Hilary
Swallow, as we first meet her, is, like her husband, a model of English rectitude
and probity, if a bit dull and humorless along the lines of the Queen herself. In
contrast to the very repressed and correct Hilary Swallow, Desiree Zapp, like
her husband, is a tough, no-nonsense American type who seems to have seen it
all and done it all. A disillusioned, wise-cracking feminist, she is not about to
be taken in by anybody or anything, least of all by her cheating husband.
 In telling his tale of the two academics, Lodge masterfully invokes all of the
time-honored devices of humor and farce. There are wild exaggerations, crazy
coincidences, absurd juxtapositions of person and place, skewed logic, and puns
and wordplay to name just a few. Lodge has a marvelous sense of the comic
and the absurd, and he pulls out all of the stops in squeezing the last laughs and
drops of humor from his story.

Small World
Small World (1984) is a novel at the crossroads by a novelist at the
crossroads.
It comprises a narrative conference of echoes, allusions, stylizations,
parodies, parallel stories, inserted tales, and, in general, recyclings of
material culled from a host of sources.
Small World shares with David Lodge's other academic novels a comic
mode, a cast of characters, and a self-reflexive narrative technique.
it highlights the theme of discovery, for it is overtly structured as a comical
quest romance based on an Arthurian model.
the reader's entrapment in the literary labyrinth of Small World breeds
enjoyment rather than anxiety or frustration.
merges form and content and embodies in its structure the very
impediments to the completion of the quest that it treats thematically.
The book's subtitle, An Academic Romance, reveals an incongruity that
helps to make its treatment of the genre parodic. Academic clashes with
romance;
Lodge's novel is peopled by one-dimensional, morally polarized characters
caught up in improbable sequences of events heavily dependent upon
preposterous coincidences. In their sprawling, baroque complexity, the
multiple plots of Small World reveal another self-consciously artificial
attribute typical of romances.
Lodge thus establishes an equivalence between his protagonist and the
readers of Small World, all of whom are confronted with the same task of
interpretation.
 Themes
1. The fundamental theme of romance is the Quest and the core strand in the novel
is the quest of young Irish academic Persse McGarrigle (his name reminiscent
of the Arthurian Sir Percival) ignorant of literary theory, the academic racket
and still a virgin for the ravishingly beautiful and dazzlingly intelligent Angelica,
who he pursues from conference to conference around the world. Except that she
in a standard but very funny comedy convention has always just left for the
next conference, and so his quest never ends.
2. Confused identities. It is a running joke that, although Persse (thinks he) is
passionately in love with the intelligent, enchanting Angelica, she has a twin sister,
Lily, who is a stripper. The outraged Persse glimpses Angelica in a porn movie
and then at a strip club, both sightings only spurring him on to save this poor
damsel. At the climax of the novel Persse excitedly loses his virginity to Lily
under the impression she is Angelica. Until she reveals she is Lily, whereupon he
is distraught. But she then confuses him (and the reader) by saying shes really
Angelica pulling his leg. At which he is deliriously happy. But then confirms she
is in fact Lily. All this is designed to show him he is pursuing a dream, an
idealised version of a woman.
3. Character. Romances are often populated by types and allegorical figures. It is
part of the pleasure of reading them to see a skillful author orchestrate meetings
between characters which are also encounters between Chastity and
Temptation, or Greed and Temperance.
All the characters in Small World have the same level of realism as in other
Lodge novels, but they are also quite plainly romance types: Persse is a knight
errant, Angelica is his Dark Lady, Miss Maiden is the wise woman who, in one
striking scene set at Delphi in Greece, parks herself over a cleft in the rock and
has a dizzy spell, accurately predicting the end of the plot. There is the
ferociously competitive and beautiful and sexually manipulative female Italian
academic, Fulvia Morgana, whose name recalls Morgan le Fay in the Arthurian
legends. There is a brilliantly funny strand involving Cheryl Summerbee, the
check-in girl at Heathrow, who therefore interacts with almost all the characters
at some stage.
4. Verbally. At a simple verbal level Lodge has his characters casually use the
language of the romance: they are said to be lured into situations, to experience
peril, think of each other as a sorceress or a hero, to cast a spell on each
other. In these tiny verbal details Lodge very enjoyably brings out his theme but
also demonstrates how much contemporary diction is in fact based on this
forgotten world.
5. Incidents, large and small also bear out the theme.
6. Locations. The novel flits around the world following the frantic globe-trotting of
its characters, with scenes placed in realistic settings in New York, London,
Ireland, Hawaii, Heidelberg, Israel, Australia and so on, in hotel rooms,
conference rooms, pubs and bars and cinemas and streets. But some of the
locations take on an obvious symbolic meaning, like the underground Chapel at
Heathrow (reincarnation of the countless chapels which Arthurian knights seek
rest in). And there is rather a lot of hanging round in brothels or strip clubs or porn
movie cinemas, which are both realistic settings for characters sneaking off for a
quiet afternoon to bump into other characters with embarrassing consequences,
and more symbolic places of temptation and misunderstanding.
7. Sterility and fertility. T.S. Eliots The Waste Land was partly based on his
reading of Jesse Westons From Ritual to Romance, an early 20th century
academic book (1920) identifying the roots of romance in pre-Christian fertility
rites associated with spring and the rebirth of the natural world.